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Rich:
You're quite right: every society on earth has its own regime of truth, its own "ideal" of truth: that is, the types of discourse which it accepts and makes function as true; the mechanisms and instances that enable one to distinguish true and false. And each of these ideals can be a force for liberation or a force for oppression. If they become stagnant, or are treated like monuments that cannot be challenged, then clearly they become pathology. The problem is of course that we are used to picturing our ideals as a plane of ethereal certitudes, which are destined to be professed on the one hand, and translated into actions on the other.
But if any psychologist will stress people's difficulty in seeing the truth about themselves, one might stress the difficulty of seeing truth, period. For even the social discourses that supposedly lead to truth -- academic discourse, political discourse, religious discourse -- are all raw power struggles. Perhaps a winner may emerge, but there is often no reason to expect that winner to converge on anything resembling objective truth. Even modern scientists, with all their ideals, reach beyond old self-imposed limits into places where truth is subjective. With their grand unification theories and cosmological schemes, they are seeking answers so fundamental that they border on theology: Why does the universe seem to operate according to mathematical laws? What is consciousness -- a biological artifact, and accident of evolution, or something deeply woven into the warp and woof of the universe? Or, how does the mind arise from the brain?
Alas, a cynicism deeper than postmodernist cynicism may have once seemed hard to imagine, but here it is. Moreover, this brand of cynicism doesn't exactly fill a gaping cultural void. Just ask the various avant-garde academics -- like "deconstructionist" theorists -- who view any human interaction as "discourses of power." To them the question of objective truth -- the question that my own cynicism tends to greet with despair -- seems increasingly quaint. Because in the end, there is no way to know whether science is converging on a single truth, the way the universe really is. And for the Pythagoreans, gazing into the confusion around them and insisting that all is number; or Paracelsus, with his elaborate system linking the body to the stars; even the Scholastic philosophers, contemplating their universe of concentric crystalline spheres -- all of us everywhere, we seek the flame of Prometheus that drives the search for perfect truth. But the real question may be whether the word "truth" can be anything but a joke.
B. L. Nelson |
